Companies in the restaurant, retail, travel, and entertainment industries are constantly seeking new promotions for attracting new customers, moving them through the purchasing process more efficiently, and increasing revenues. Additionally, these entities also constantly seek new ways to improve customer retention. In recent years, technology has been used to implement new ways to attract customers and to create store-specific customer profiles and the like for purposes of improving target marketing. The Internet has facilitated such efforts by enabling data management of the collected customer information.
For example, the Internet has been used to facilitate on-line ordering of pizza through the web sites of several pizza chains. The Internet has also been used to facilitate the placement of customer reservations at eat-in restaurants. See, for example, OpenTable.com, themagellannetwork.com, guestbridge.com, avenista.com, and imagicrestaurantsoftware.com. Additionally, systems have been proposed whereby a customer may access a webpage and choose restaurants by wait time, which is adjusted in real-time.
In addition, a handful of software companies specialize in software solutions for restaurants that allow the restaurants to “turn tables” more efficiently. For example, such systems are provided by ntnwireless.com, qsrautomation.com, guestbridge.com, and nurol.com. However, the solutions offered by such companies are generally limited to seating, scheduling, kitchen management, food presentation, and wait time calculations. Such companies also provide complementary hardware devices such as hostess computer stations, handheld ordering devices that wait staff in restaurants may use to send orders directly back to the kitchen for preparation, and a variety of self-check-in/checkout systems used in grocery and department stores, at airline check-in stations, and the like.
Also, a variety of Internet solutions are available that assist companies in collecting customer data for purposes of direct marketing. However, such information is generally limited to demographic information and purchase information when goods are purchased.
Despite the efficiencies introduced by these systems, much remains to be done to enhance the customer experience when traveling or visiting restaurant, retail, travel, and entertainment establishments. For example, the customer experience is significantly improved when the customer wait time is reduced. Profits of restaurant, retail, travel and entertainment establishments could also be significantly increased by improved customer turnover due to increased efficiencies. Also, shorter wait times would lead to fewer customers being lost during peak times as fewer customers would decide to abandon the wait queue. Thus, a system and method is desired that improves customer service by minimizing customer wait time while also improving accuracy of service requests and marketing efficiency by collecting data relating to customer service preferences for restaurant, retail, travel, and entertainment. The collected data may be used to profile customer purchasing choices for such disparate items as condiment preferences, suit cut, preferences for a baggage handling service, and the like for use in improving marketing efficiencies. The present invention has been designed to meet such needs in the art.